Characteristic-eddy decomposition of turbulence in a channel

The proper orthogonal decomposition technique (Lumley's decomposition) is applied to the turbulent flow in a channel, to extract coherent structures by decomposing the velocity field into characteristic eddies with random coefficients. In the homogeneous spatial directions a generalization of the shot-noise expansion is used to determine the characteristic eddies. In this expansion the Fourier coefficients of the characteristic eddy cannot be obtained from second-order statistics. Three different techniques are used to determine the phases of these coefficients: (i) a technique based on the bispectrum, (ii) a spatial compactness requirement, and (iii) a functional continuity argument. Results from these three techniques are found to be very similar. The implications of these techniques and the shot-noise expansion are discussed in the Appendix. The dominant eddy is found to contribute as much as 76% to the turbulent kinetic energy. In two and three dimensions, the characteristic eddies consist of an ejection region straddled by streamwise vortices which leave the wall in a very short streamwise distance of approximately 100 wall units.